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Sincerely, Charles Kozierok
Author and Publisher, The TCP/IP Guide

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As the
previous topic mentioned, a key concept
in Usenet communication is the newsgroup. Newsgroups are in fact
the addressing mechanism for Usenet, and sending a Usenet article to
a newsgroup is equivalent to sending e-mail to an electronic
mail address. Newsgroups are analogous
to other group communication venues such as mailing lists, chat rooms,
Internet
Relay Chat channels or BBS forumsthough
calling a newsgroup a list, room, channel
or BBS is likely to elicit a negative reaction from Usenet
old-timers.

Like any addressing mechanism, newsgroups
must be uniquely identifiable. Each newsgroup has a newsgroup name
that describes what the topic of the newsgroup is about, and differentiates
it from other newsgroups. Since there are many thousands of different
newsgroups, they are arranged into sets called hierarchies. Each
hierarchy contains a tree structure of related newsgroups.

Usenet Newsgroup Hierarchies

The total collection of newsgroup
hierarchies is in many ways similar to the domain
name tree structure used in DNS. Each
Usenet hierarchy is like a collection of all the domain names within
a DNS top-level
domain. Just as a domain name like www.pcguide.com
is formed by appending the label of the top level domain com
to the second-level domain name pcguide and the subdomain
www, newsgroup names are created in the same way. They are
created from a top-level newsgroup hierarchy name, to which are attached
a set of descriptive label that describe the newsgroup's place in the
hierarchy.

One difference between DNS and Usenet
hierarchies is that while DNS
names are created from right to left as
you go down the tree, Usenet newsgroup names are formed
in the more natural (for English speakers) left to right
order. For example, one of the main Usenet hierarchies is the comp
hierarchy, devoted to computer topics. Within comp is a
sub-hierarchy on data communications called dcom, and within
that a group that discusses data cabling. This group is called comp.dcom.cabling.
Almost all newsgroups are structured in this manner.

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